Hard drives have risen in price and become increasingly difficult to find in Hong Kong due to the sudden explosion of a unique cryptocurrency called Chia, which is mined using storage devices rather than GPUs. While the coin is still relatively niche (it isn’t even the first coin to leverage unused storage space for mining), Chinese manufacturers have already begun capitalizing on its potential value by readying SSDs that are specifically designed for mining cryptocurrency. These drives will presumably have a larger capacity and higher TBW life based on the high number of read/write operations that take place during the mining process.
During the mining process, a large number of read and write operations will be generated, which consumes a lot of SSD. Therefore, a hard disk with large capacity and high TBW life is required. The company said that with the gradual popularity of Chia mining, the market supply and demand of SSDs may become tighter, and the market price may rise substantially.